The former roomie/member of the landed gentry let me know Thomas Dolby's got video from his October 2007 "Sputnik and Beyond" show downloadable now, as four 40MB files. "This was a one-off concert to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik 1, the first man-made satellite successfully launched into space. My friend David Hoffman, a documentary filmmaker, had recently premiered his full-length movie ‘Sputnik Mania’ (previously entitled The Fever of ‘57) and he was kind enough to allow me to use footage and entire edited sequences from his film, to project at the ICA. The Radio Science Orchestra arranged and performed a live soundtrack, with commentary provided by pop culturist/DJ/sci-fi writer Ken Hollings."

This is what people can achieve: "Flies faster than a rifle bullet.. it's exciting to sit at 60,000 feet and see the curvature of the Earth; it's exciting to sit at 60,000 feet and see the dark of outer space.. to have a horizon-to-horizon 750 mile range. That's exciting. When you take off for New York in the dark, and see the sun rise in the west, you know you're doing something slightly different." Concorde, here shown in a four minute clip narrated by its pilots, and pointed out by captpackrat.

Some interesting connections are highlighted by Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican congressman. His investigation links Terry Nichols, Ramzi Yousef, and Timothy McVeigh, only to find his requests for interviewing Yousef blocked by the Justice Department.

So, the iPhone/iPod touch saw the roadmap laid out for application development. ^_^ It's the real deal, rather than some half-baked sandbox. What caught my eye, though, was mention of the iFund Initiative "with $100 million in venture capital to invest in companies developing applications and services for Apple's innovative iPhone and iPod touch." And EA announced Spore for it, too (whether the "full" or DS version is another matter - looks closer to the latter), alongside Sega with Super Monkeyball, and ePocrates and Salesforce will be there. ^_^ Ars Technica forum response over here. Engadget's coverage, 37signals, and Apple.

Also noting the SDK's release was John Carmack: "We (Id) have put in our application like everyone else, so I don't have any inside information at this point. I think Steve is still pissed at me over some negative comments I made about iPod development tools a while ago. Just based on the blurbs, it looks very good -- a simulator plus debugging on the native device is the best of both worlds, and a 70% royalty deal for apps over iTunes is quite good. The iTunes distribution channel is really a more important aspect than a lot of people understand. The ability to distribute larger applications than the over-the-air limits and effectively market your title with more than a dozen character deck name, combined with the reasonable income split make this look like a very interesting market. This type of developer / customer interaction is probably the wave of the future for mobile devices, it will be interesting to see how quickly the other players can react. Based on our experiences with the carriers, I am betting not very quickly."

Clear off a bit of disk space if you're fetching the SDK - it's a 2.1GB download. Sadly, it's for Intel Macs only, so I'm out in the cold for now. Or is it? "FWIW this is on a PowerPC Mac where I managed to get the full SDK installed by manually opening the packages. Despite Apple not supporting it, it seems to work well; even the simulator runs."

Ah, the joys of security theater.. someone brings a MacBook Air through TSAland: 'One takes me aside to a partitioned cubicle. Another of the endless supply of TSA agents takes the rest of my bags to a different cubicle. No yellow brick road here, just a pair of yellow painted feet on the floor, and my flight is boarding. I am made to understand that I should stand and wait. My laptop is on the table in front of me, just beyond reach, like I am waiting to collect my personal effects after being paroled. I'm standing, watching my laptop on the table, listening to security clucking just behind me. "There's no drive," one says. "And no ports on the back. It has a couple of lines where the drive should be," she continues.'

This restoration technique struck me as quite ingenious. They're wanting to restore the original color from shows like Doctor Who, where the only surviving prints tend to be b&w film copies. But how can you possibly turn monochrome footage into color, without either entirely faking it, or having to painstakingly work from occasionally available low quality home video recordings, using those for visual references? Apparently, there is a way: "Any black and white telerecording of a colour programme is prone to pick up interference from the colour encoded video signal. This manifests itself as a pattern of small grey dots, called chroma-dots, across the picture. There was a way to stop this from happening, by using a special filter to cut out the electronic artefacts. However, the interference was often deemed so minor that the technicians doing the transfers used no filter and so the resultant film prints often contain a burnt in pattern of these chromadots. Insell suggested that it might be possible to decode the original colour signal of the show from these chromadots, since they contain an electronic remnant of the original video signal. Since then, Insell has set up an independent group - outside the BBC - to put together a technology to extract this coded pattern within the black and white film and decode it."

How would cats react to a (running) vacuum cleaner with a laser pointer aimed a few inches in front of it? Which impulse would win out?

Seeing a new announcement of a college or university establishing a presence in SL is nothing new, but I was tickled to see the Johnson County Community College apparently has one of those superb hare sculptures in RL, and in SL too.

The comments for this entry need to be enjoyed in their entirety; be sure to expand the threads. Anyone who's had a cat go into heat will know whereof these people speak. ^_^;

On which note, "The United States is one of the world's most undersexed countries, according to a new study released Monday. Just 53% of Americans having regular, weekly sex according to results from the Durex Sexual Wellbeing Global Survey of 26,000 people in 26 countries, tying the USA with Nigeria for the second worst spot on the list." (Number one being Japan, with Greece heading the other end of the list)

circuit_four somehow noticed carbon diselenide, an aromatic compound, in the olfactory, if not chemical, sense. "Selenium compounds are, if anything, more intrinsically noxious than sulfur ones. Imagine a sort of hyperskunk, scattering its enemies before it and making them carom off trees and dive into ponds." "The first report of the compound in the chemical literature is from a German university group from 1936, and it was a memorable debut. A colleague of mine had a copy of this paper in his files, and he treasured a footnote from the experimental section which related how the vapors had unfortunately escaped the laboratory and forced the evacuation of a nearby village."

The European Parliament report on fraud in staff allowances I mentioned last time has been leaked by Paul van Buitenen, MEP for the Netherlands. (Irksomely, the BBC article failed to mention where it could be found, but Wikileaks was happy to oblige)

Some veryyoung jackrabbits someone loving found, and is carefully (and knowledgably) now attempting to raise by hand.

Very much a series of in-jokes, but if you know SL, Gods of Second Life may prove amusing, comprising a multitude of shrines. "Uncle Phil is the Creator from who's loins the world of Second Life and Ruth, the All-Mother have spung. The bringer of Order from Chaos and Pixelated Reality from the Great Void. An effigy of Philip's pants is the shrine of Ruth." The trinity is completed by "The Great Corey". And as the teleporter inscription commands:

There are all manner of wonders in SL; but I thought I'd point out a contrary example, in Sun's presence. As our hero illustrates, it's perfectly competently realised, but with an aura of 'okay, now what?'.

An anthology of Tamil swearing, including such invaluable phrases as "You, who is without an asshole" and "Your dick is smaller than the toothpick I have in my mouth".

Very nice. Samsung's shipping a 500GB 2.5" drive - unlike other makers, it's a normal 5400rpm, rather than slowing down to 4200, and 9.5mm high, so it'll actually fit in most laptops. SATA only, but that's par for the course now; unfortunately, the Intel migration from PowerBooks to the MacBook Pros also brought with it the IDE to SATA switch, so it's not something I can drop into Hyzenthlay - 250GB seems to be about the largest available in IDE.

Rather a neat little scribbling on the nature of popularity and commercial success: 1000 True Fans, illustrating what I'd say reflects the future of artistic endeavor, beyond the giant record labels and publishers.

The California Supreme Court's been hearing arguments for and against recognising marriage between same or different gender couples.

So, I finally got around to finishing off Torchwood s2e5 "Adam" - certainly one of the best episodes, albeit with yet another nihilistic finale. (And that camerawork.. damn, that's offputting. Maybe the BBC can offer a third version for airing: regular, family-friendly, and image-stabilised) Whilst Reset's plot was pretty much just along for the ride, the character interplay was a joy, not to mention seeing Martha Jones back to being her own self, independent of the Doctor.